Readings on Fascism and National Socialism eBook

FUNDAMENTAL IDEAS.

1. Philosophic Conception.

Like every concrete political conception, Fascism
is thought and action. It is action with an inherent
doctrine which, arising out of a given system of historic
forces, is inserted in it and works on it from within.
It has therefore a form co-related to the contingencies
of time and place; but it has at the same time an ideal
content which elevates it into a formula of truth
in the higher region of the history of thought.

There is no way of exercising a spiritual influence
on the things of the world by means of a human will-power
commanding the wills of others, without first having
a clear conception of the particular and transient
reality on which the will-power must act, and without
also having a clear conception of the universal and
permanent reality in which the particular and transient
reality has its life and being. To know men we
must have a knowledge of man; and to have a knowledge
of man we must know the reality of things and their
laws.

There can be no conception of a State which is not
fundamentally a conception of Life. It is a philosophy
or intuition, a system of ideas which evolves itself
into a system of logical contraction, or which concentrates
itself in a vision or in a faith, but which is always,
at least virtually, an organic conception of the world.

2. Spiritualised Conception.

Fascism would therefore not be understood in many
of its manifestations (as, for example, in its organisations
of the Party, its system of education, its discipline)
were it not considered in the light of its general
view of life. A spiritualised view.

To Fascism the world is not this material world which
appears on the surface, in which man is an individual
separated from all other men, standing by himself
and subject to a natural law which instinctively impels
him to lead a life of momentary and egoistic pleasure.
In Fascism man is an individual who is the nation
and the country. He is this by a moral law which
embraces and binds together individuals and generations
in an established tradition and mission, a moral law
which suppresses the instinct to lead a life confined
to a brief cycle of pleasure in order, instead, to
replace it within the orbit of duty in a superior
conception of life, free from the limits of time and
space a life in which the individual by self-abnegation
and by the sacrifice of his particular interests,
even by death, realises the entirely spiritual existence
in which his value as a man consists.

3. Positive Conception of Life as a Struggle.

It is therefore a spiritual conception, itself also
a result of the general reaction of the Century against
the languid and materialistic positivism of the Eighteenth
Century. Anti-positivist, but positive:
neither sceptical nor agnostic, neither pessimistic
nor passively optimistic, as are in general the doctrines
(all of them negative) which place the centre of life
outside of man, who by his free will can and should
create his own world for himself.